In the slags and ashes of thermal waste reclamation as well as in the slags of metal production, there are numerous ferrous and nonferrous metals which are integrated in their native form in mineral slags or which are heavily scaled. These metals can only be recovered efficiently from the material conglomerates, if these metals are released or separated from their composites/scale formations such that they can be subsequently segregated from the material flow by magnets or nonferrous metal separators.
According to prior art such slags are fragmentized with traditional hammer and impact mills and are subsequently fed into magnetic and nonferrous metal separators.
With hammer and impact mills, the decomposition and the reclamation of metals with a particle size of more than 20 mm is possible as well as efficient. For the decomposition of smaller metal particles with these mills, it would be necessary to adjust very small gap separations, such as less than 20 mm, which would then result in a significant increase in grind crushing at the expense of impact crushing. The consequence of this grind crushing would be that soft nonferrous metals would be comminuted to such an extent that they could no longer be separated by means of a nonferrous metal separator. For this reason, the reclamation of small metal particles which are present in slags in their native form, using agglomerate breakers from prior art, is possible only to a limited extent.